The business model of many companies on the Internet mostly depends on the display of advertisements on the client web browser. The rise of solutions enabling to block or skip such ads greatly endangers this mainstream source of revenue. Search engines are particularly at risk.
Advertisements represent a major source of revenue for many websites and companies like providers of search engines or newspapers sites. If advertisements were to be massively rejected—and even “well targeted”, effective or informative ads of major companies—, there would be no more free contents or services anymore. Currently, only the most technically proficient users are aware of such adblocking techniques but a default integration of such tools in mass-market web browsers or desktop client would result in huge losses for companies whose business model rely on advertisement. There is a need to secure the display of advertisements on web browsers, to prevent the growing use of adblocking techniques.
Advertisements comprise digital content such as text areas, still images, animated images or even videos embedded in web pages. When a member of the advertising audience selects one of these ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to the advertiser's website (“click-through” process).
It appears that more and more consumers want to avoid intrusive marketing. They declare to be saturated by highly distracting ads, though some industry players try to leverage “non-annoying” and “informative” ads. Indeed, there are very few simple, easy to read, non-intrusive, text advertisements. Instead, ads are often flash or animated gif banners which users feel to be too invasive: pop-ups, pop-unders, and the like sometimes cover the desirable contents. Flashing graphics make it very hard to read real text elsewhere on the page; most of the time ads that are delivered are not appropriate (so-called “targeted ads” often fail). They are considered as distracting the reader with “noise”. The targeting of users may also imply to track habits and to threaten privacy.
For all above reasons, more and more users use so-called adblockers. From users' point of view, adblocking benefits include cleaner-looking web pages, lower resource-usage and increased bandwidth. The loading of pages is also said to be speeded-up (many pages are designed to load heavy ads first).
The state of the art comprises adblocking techniques enabling to skip or to remove advertisements on web browsers, such as pure text browsers, pop-up blockers, blacklists of URLs of ad servers, text filtering tools (based on keywords, to prevent ad files from loading), script blockers, use of CSS rules (to hide specific HTML and XHTML elements), etc.
On the reverse side (i.e. secure the display of advertisements), it appears that there are very few efficient technical solutions available. Aside technical approaches, there are rather quite non-technical methods. For example, permission marketing methods are tested. Users may indeed target ads instead of ads targeting users. But these methods do not apply well to mass markets. Other methods based on users profiling are tried by advertisers or their partners to deliver better perceived forms of advertisements, but it poses privacy threats. If no reliable solution emerges to secure the display of advertisements, advertising formats may evolve to these contextual, interactive, permission-based and targeted messaging to retain consumer's attention and to help minimize both irritation and “tuning out”. A few content or service providers also try to warn their users on damages implied by the use of adblocking techniques by arguing that it takes revenue out of the people that work hard to provide them contents and services. Sometimes they require a specific license agreement for visiting their websites. In conclusion, none of these (non-technical) methods succeed to effectively act as countermeasures to adblocking techniques and/or the use of RSS feeds and/or the use of personalized web pages, and in fine, to secure revenues streams.
There is a need for a method enabling to secure the display of advertisements on digital devices, and more generally of securely delivering content.